“James Drake: Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash)”

In spending more than two years making 1,242 drawings, artist James Drake learned a thing or two.

“Believe it or not,” said the genial, Texas-born artist as he oversaw the installation of his new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, “I learned that less is more.”

That might seem odd, given that this is Drake’s largest exhibition in a distinguished career spanning four decades and hundreds of shows worldwide. It is also one of the biggest single installations ever mounted by MCASD.

With the exception of a small gallery displaying some of Drake’s earlier works, “James Drake: Anatomy of Drawing and Space (Brain Trash)” fills all of the institution’s cavernous downtown space.

And yet, upon seeing this wondrous assemblage of images, Drake’s statement is completely understandable. His work occupies a universe where less and more are not opposites, but happily co-exist, as does the personal and the public, the abstract and the representational, the scientific and the intuitive, the formal and the informal, the spoken and the unspoken.

The list goes on, given that such seeming dualities are at the core of Drake’s work. But every viewer will extract his own list, or even create his own world, from Drake’s remarkable achievement.

“When we first saw the individual drawings — and we saw a lot of them — and you really looked at these drawings, they worked one at a time, and two at a time, and as clusters,” said the museum’s chief curator, Kathryn Kanjo.“So it’s something about that small part also being something larger.

“But what was revealed ultimately was how, through the practice of drawing, he’s able to reiterate all of his creative, intellectual and artistic concerns. It is his retrospective exhibition in a single work.”

Creative freedom

You could also turn that thought around and say that all of Drake’s art constitutes a single exhibition.

“I think of all of the work I’ve ever done as one big piece,” Drake said. “I know that sounds a little crazy. Now I’ve finally done one big piece and it has all of those elements (that are found in his other work).

“But the most exciting thing, really, was just the idea of being free to do whatever I felt like in the studio without any restriction, except the size of the paper. That was the real (kick), for me.”

Until a couple of years ago, Drake had generally worked around themes, whether his photographs of transvestite prostitutes in Juarez and El Paso — “Qué Linda La Brisa” — that were shown in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, or his video installation — “Tongue-Cut Sparrows (Inside Outside),” exhibited in the 2007 Venice Biennial, which dealt with language (even unspoken language) and was prompted by the women who congregate outside of jails and silently communicate with their family members inside.